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Thursday, March 27, 2014

Tischendorf Discussion - TC Alt List

Recently, James Snapp Jr. and Steven Avery have been having an ongoing discussion about the question of the authenticity, age, and history of the Codex Sinaiticus, the famous Biblical manuscript now residing in the British Museum, and which is now online as well.

This discussion was taking place on Facebook, but Steven kindly reposted it in the Yahoo Groups TC Alt List (Textual Criticism Alternate List).

Here is the remarkable exchange, and links to important evidences:

Hi,

James and I have been discussion the Sinaiticus issues on Facebook.
For clarity of posting, editing and readability, I am going to switch
here for now.

The pictures on the Facebook page are nice, the lack of editing
formatting is a real problem.

Kyrillos was in the process of cataloging the library when
Tischendorf arrived at the monastery .... Not until 1871, three years
before his untimely death, did he describe in his book The Sinai Bible
 Its Discovery, Publication and Acquisition his version of having
found it: ... I had studied them as well for the purpose of a
new Greek paleography, and in some cases, including the Vatican Bible,
had facsimiled them with my own hand.

Quite clear.

While Jürgen Gottschlich writes a footnote saying that Tischendorf was
mistaken, I think we should take Tischendorf's own words at face.
He was elderly at this point and let slip something hidden in earlier
days.

James Snapp
You wrote: "He ripped pages out of Sinaiticus in 1844 and later
removed its binding." -- Are you saying that the entire story about
the basket is something that Tischendorf made up?

Steven
Definitely. Fifteen years after the theft, in the crucible of
dealing with the Russian bureaucrats and the Orthodox hierarchy and
wanting the public support, it became a handy cry.

James Snapp

> And, inasmuch as the monks of St. Catherine's insisted that the

manuscript had belonged to them for many years, are you also saying that
some of the monks at St. Catherine's co-operated with him in this
deception?

Steven
Definitely, Tischendorf had people cooperating with him in the
monastery. Kyrillus the librarian (later the head of the monastery)
and the young oeconomus were examples. Baksheesh with monastery FOT
would explain how he got the 1853 large stash of manuscripts.

The deception about the basket and burning story was very late and
designed for politics and for public support, and afaik never had an iota
of corroboration by anybody in the monastery. So I am not sure who
you think "co-operated with him in this deception?". Do
you have any evidence of this "cooperation" in regard to the
burning basket tissuedorf?

Travels in the East is helpful, Tischendorf was a bit more revealing
about monastery helpers because it was before the heist of 1853 and the
grand heist of 1859, and the smaller heist of 1844 was still a
secret.

Remember, when he first ripped out the
43 leaves from the bound book in 1844, we have an account to his family
(which may itself be sanitized) which only said, per the Jeffery-Michael
Featherstone summary:

Steven
To put it bluntly, that is the language of the thief. Wow, look,
the stuff "came into my possession". Nothing even about a nice
gift from Cyrillus, or saving anything from the fire,.

==================================================

James Snapp

> You wrote: "I asked you when the Vaticanus sections were first

noted and how they are dated, and you did not answer." That's
because I don't know. I'll need another flash-drive before I can download
the Birch volume. But you're the one trying to show that Tischendorf
could have added the marginalia, so the burden is on you to show that he
could have been aware of them.

Steven
And I already showed that Tischendorf or friends of Tischendorf could
have added the marginalia, that is a done deal. The Vaticanus
situation is interesting because all this is your principle
argument.

==================================================

James Snapp

> You asked: "Is a picture of the Vaticanus numbers

available?" Wieland Willker, iirc, posted a picture of at least one
of them in his page on Codex Vaticanus (see the section "Lectionary
labels." He also lists some of them. (see
http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/Vaticanus/general.html ) His
information about how well the numbers fit the usual reading-calendar is
not quite right, though; for details about that see Euthaliana.

What I see there is this.

... This is Act 7:30-35.
Interestingly only at this instance the words T. A EBDOMA appear. Page
1391 C: I have reinforced the letters in the image to make them more
clearly visible.

(pic from page)

Are you saying that has one of the
pre-Euthalian Acts section numbers from 1-69?

==================================================

James Snapp
You wrote: "The New Finds includes sections wrapped right in between
sections of Uspensky and Tischendorf." What are you suggesting about
the new finds? That Tischendorf or some accomplice took intact pages from
a codex made by Simonides, tore them out, and placed them in another room
(which was eventually sealed off, until 1975?

Steven
Sure. That is, essentially, the natural conclusion, allowing some nuance
on the exactness of circumstances. When you have New Finds pages
smack between and next to sections being used by Tischendorf and/or
Uspensky, Ockham tells you loud and clear ... tampering is how the pages
got into the New Finds room. Logic 101.

Plus, some New Finds pages show directly that they were part of
tampering, or play, or experimenting.

The Codex Sinaiticus and the Manuscripts of
Mt Sinai in the Collections of the National Library of Russia
http://www.nlr.ru/eng/exib/CodexSinaiticus/cs1.htmlFragment of a sheet of the Codex Sinaiticus from the Society of
Lovers of Ancient Literature in Saint Petersburg
Codex Sinaiticus. Fragment of the Book of Judith (11:25 - 12:3,59).
Parchment. Fragment of the sheet. 18,8 ? 14,6 cm.
The fragment contains 35 extant lines of text in 3 incomplete
columns.The text is washed,
almost unreadable.This is a black and white photocopy of
the fragment of the sheet, obtained using a technique called
"multispectral imaging", which enables the traces of the
writing to be read. RNB. OLDP. O. 156

Hmmm... this is not New Finds
damage... Why not test the washing? Maybe you will find lemon juice
and herbs, as discussed by Kallinikos. Perhaps it was a test, work and
discard page.

Incidentally, one writer noted that it is not so clear that the room was
fully sealed off at any time. I don't have that note handy,
though.

==================================================

James Snapp
You wrote: "The 1890s Bodleian librarian Falconer Madan said that
the specific points of marks referenced by Simonides were lacuna when the
ms was examined." Which is another way of saying: Simonides, after
reading about what parts of the MS were extant, and what parts were not
extant, claimed that proof that he had written the MS were in the
non-extant parts.

Steven
Clearly you have not read Falconer Madan, since he was sharp enough to
consider that possibility, and much more. A common problem of
the Sinaiticus authenticity defenders, they simply are not familiar with
the material.

Books in manuscript - Literary Forgeries
(1893)
Falconer Madan
http://books.google.com/books?id=o_s8AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA127
... Simonides asserted, not only that he had written it, but that, in
view of the probable scepticism of scholars, he had placed certain
private signs on particular leaves of the codex. When pressed to specify
these marks, he gave a list of the leaves on which were to be found his
initials or other monogram. The test was a fair one, and the MS., which
was at St Petersburg, was carefully inspected. Every leaf designated by
Simonides was found to be imperfect at the part where the mark was to
have been found. Deliberate mutilation by an enemy, said his friends. But
many thought that the wily Greek had acquired through private friends a
note of some imperfect leaves in the MS., and had made unscrupulous use
of the information.

Steven
Now, I am not saying that this is a full review of the markings
controversy, but a simple read of Falconer Madan would show you that your
reinterpretation was simply errant.

James Snapp
You wrote: "New theories were developed that Simonides must have had
a contorted inside man in Germany telling him where to claim
markings." Not an inside man -- Tischendorf's own published
descriptions of the MS.

Steven
Again, why not reading the material you are trying to discount
first?

Falconer Madan was the Bodleian librarian, with access to lots of
material that is either archived away or non-extant today. Like
James Anson Farrer, he was no partisan, he was no slouch on a couch, he
was a respected and learned scholar.

Madan concluded that the exactness of what
was said by Simonides was not publicly available information, and thus
came forth the accusations that he had an inside man in Leipzig.

==================================================

James Snapp
You wrote: "The introductory quire to the NT strangely gone and
renumbered" -- this is an indication, as Skeat deduced, that Codex
Sinaiticus was never finished; canon-tables had been prepared for it but
they were not included.

Steven
This is about as likely as the similar scenario for the Mark
ending. Between slim and none. Such explanations are part of
the SCS -- Sinaiticus Circularity Syndrome.

Example .. there must have been a rebinding in 700 AD. Wait, maybe one in
1844 before Uspensky saw the manuscript. We have to have some
explanation, even if there is no real evidence or sense.

==================================================

James Snapp
You wrote: "Placing a little light note about the marginalia in Acts
(the job would take about 15 minutes) could have been just a little game
of cross-reference." So you are proposing that after Simonides
forged the entire codex,

Steven
Simonides never asserted his work was a forgery. The fact that Uspensky
saw it with white parchment and did not write about it as a valuable
ancient manuscript is one corroboration of this view. Within the
Simoneidos considerations, I think the evidence on this point is unclear.

James Snapp
Tischendorf had fun with it by adding marginalia?

Steven
What I said was crystal clear. Somebody, likely Tischendorf or a
friend of Tischendorf, may have played around a bit, putting in a few
section numbers very lightly. It would be good for a real
palaeographic expert (not those in the pocket of the British Library) to
discuss the dates of the numbers and what other handwriting they might
match.

Why would you think nobody wrote on the manuscript for the 15 years when
it was unbound and kicking around Sinai and Cairo? Even in a
non-Simonides scenario, there is no basis for such an
assumption.

James Snapp
You asked, "Why were most of the numbers [in the lection-list in the
margin of Acts] skipped?" One can only guess.

Steven
You can do more than guess.
You can conclude that they were being handled by somebody in an ad hoc
fashion.

James Snapp
Do I find it strange? Yes; although it wouldn't be /bizarre/ for a
congregation in the 600's to follow an unusual lectionary.

Steven
James, if you start dating those numbers to 600 AD, you have essentially
lost the Vaticanus connection. And they don't look to me like 4th
century, it looks like some of the numbers show up in the Byzantine and
Modern sections of number history, rather than ancient Greek.

However, on many such issues the goal now is to get really knowledgeable
gentlemen more involved. They should not have any ties to the
British Library, whose learned scholars seem to always start from the
assumption (surprise!) that Sinaiticus is a priceless antiquity
manuscript.

James Snapp
I figure that the source from which the lection-list was copied into
Aleph and B stopped at about the same point where the list stops in
Aleph, but there's no way to prove this, against other possibilities. But
this is a pebble of ambiguity next to the mountain of difficulties one
must ask when facing the epicycles involved in the forgery-theory: why
were the section-numbers in the Gospels written so erratically and
incompletely? Why were these lectionary-notes only added partially? Etc.

Steven
As I explained, all this is much simpler to account for in the monastery
and Cairo and Tischendorf theories, than in a valuable manuscript
production stage. Here is the Robinson attempted "explanation"
of the incomplete Sinaiticus sections.

Euthaliana (1905)
Joseph Armitage Robinson
http://books.google.com/books?id=_mYuAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA2-PA36Can it be that the numbers were written in before the codex was
bound, and that for some reason the scribe became discontented with his
task and broke it off at the end of a gathering of leaves ?

You can get anything you want, in the
Sinaiticus Authenticity Restaurant.

James Snapp
You wrote: "You are now hinting that this marginalia might have been
added many centuries after production. From what source? Do you really
think Vaticanus and Sinaiticus sat side-by-side around 800 AD or 1000
AD?" I'm not /hinting/, and I'm not suggesting /many centuries;

Steven
See, eg. your 600 AD note above.

James Snapp
I'm saying -- as I said clearly before (See my essay on the question of
whether Vaticanus and Sinaiticus share a scriptorium) -- that these
lectionary-related notes in Acts were added in the 600's (or maybe 700's)
and imply that at some point they were either side-by-side, or that each
was alongside the same source-material from which the lection-notes were
derived. Robinson said it before I did. Are you sure you read Robinson
carefully?

Steven
Are you talking about the super-vague conjecturing?

"this seems to imply that the Aleph and
B were at an early stage of their history lying side by side in the same
library." (p. 37)

Steven
Then, on p. 42, he goes into the Latin mss that have similar Acts
sections.

Opening up a whole nother potential vector of transmission into
Sinaiticus that I had missed earlier. By my accepting the claim
that these 69-sections in Acts only existed in Vaticanus and
Sinaiticus.

Steven
Any theory that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were side-by-side for hundreds
of years has a huge element of special pleading involved. And if
the theory is based principally on the Acts section marginalia, it is
typical circularity in the big picture. Since the evidence is
strong that Sinaiticus did not even exist for a millennium and more
later.

========

An interesting Sinaiticus quirk is in Revelation, where it is in essence
an early commentary pre-figuring later commentaries. Properly
considered, this is just one more of numerous philological evidences
against Sinaiticus authenticity. (This one is only modest, so far. Hermas
is super-alarm bells. Others vary, discoveries are made now that we know
about the issues. With Revelation, it is worthwhile to point elements
like this out in our desire to understand the textual history.)

The Apocalypse in codex Sinaiticus is a striking example of a
fourth-century text that differs substantially from modern critical
editions. It exhibits dozens of differences at key points, reflecting the
concerns, interests, and idiosyncrasies of its earliest copyists and
readers. Taken as a whole, Sinaiticuss text of Revelation may constitute
one of our earliest Christian commentaries on the book, disclosing its
fourth-century milieu and anticipating the later concerns of Oecumenius
and Andrew of Caesarea. This is no commentary in the contemporary sense,
however. Sinaiticuss readings range from the spectacular to the mundane
and include the theological, the liturgical, the commonplace and even the
infelicitous. It is a text ever in tension with itself, effective both in
its capacity to obscure as well as in its regulation of meaning. Clarity
and confusion co-reign and compete for our attention. Despite that, we
can discern a concerted effort to elucidate the Apocalypses message by
scores of changes throughout. Some of these are inherited. Others
created. All affected the reading of the text.

Andreas is about 600 AD, Oecumenius is much
later. Likely, there was no "anticipation" here. A much simpler
explanation, the Sinaiticus Revelation was written by some one
familiar with the commentaries. A good study and check would be
word matches of the Sinaiticus text with the later commentaries.

Once you get past Sinaiticus circularity, you start to look at the
evidences afresh.